SOURCE: Engelberg, Edward. “Tolstoy's ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’: The Dying Life, Chekhov's ‘A Dreary Story’: The Living Death.” In The Elegiac Fictions: The Motif of the Unlived Life, pp. 87-96. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich preceded in date of publication Chekhov's less well-known “A Dreary Story” by three years: 1886 and 1889. Chekhov's tale has been called a response to the challenge laid down by Tolstoy's. Certainly both stories are sufficiently similar and dissimilar to be discussed together (as they have been), for each author explored a common problem from a somewhat different aperture.1 It is worth knowing that, like Chekhov's story, Tolstoy's was originally planned as a first-person-narrative memoir, that is, Ivan telling his own story by means of...